


Unaccounted For

by radondoran



Category: Monsters University (2013)
Genre: Community: disney_kink, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, Sickfic, money issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-09
Updated: 2013-07-09
Packaged: 2017-12-21 17:38:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/903014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radondoran/pseuds/radondoran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mike didn't plan on this.  It's a good thing Sulley knows how to improvise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unaccounted For

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [a disney-kink prompt](http://disney-kink.livejournal.com/9516.html?thread=5791020#t5791020) asking for Sulley taking care of a sick Mike.

It had only been a few months, but Sulley and Mike were settling nicely into their new life at Monsters Incorporated. The days blended together in the routine of mailroom work, but the pages of the calendar and the trees outside the window of their apartment were a reminder of how time was passing. Summer had come and gone; September had come and with it the beginning of the new school year at Monsters University, and the reminder of how their paths had changed so much since the September before. Now the leaves were falling from the trees, heralding the approach of winter and Yule season—and, in a crowded factory, of flu season.

As soon as the first wave of scarers had turned up absent, Mike had gotten paranoid. "I can't get sick," he'd declared, and taken every step to prevent it. He started washing his hands at every opportunity, carrying around a can of Lysol, and going to absurd lengths to avoid touching doorknobs. Sulley had rolled his eyes and opened the doors himself with his bare hands. And so, because fate has a cruel sense of humor, Sulley found that he was not at all surprised when Mike paused on their mail pickup round one morning to rub at his temples with a pained expression.

"You all right?" Sulley asked.

"Yeah—yeah, I'm fine! Sun in my eye, that's all." Mike forced a smile and hurried forward again to make up for the lost time.

Sulley sighed internally, and kept watching. He watched Mike pick at his food all through lunch, and he watched Mike suppressing shivers in the mailroom, even though the basement of Monsters Inc. was generally considered to be overheated for Monstropolis's mild winters. He asked a couple more times if anything was wrong, but each time Mike insisted with increasing vehemence that he was fine.

And Sulley was almost inclined to believe him. Sure, he looked kind of sick, but he really was acting okay. He worked with more or less his usual efficiency, and if anything he spent the day talking more than usual.

Now he was pacing as he talked, going over their tasks for the afternoon. "Benitez is on Scare Floor H today working with Lanning, and she needs us to deliver this memo to Gunderson on E, but because it concerns accounting and scare theory, we're gonna need to keep the carbon copies for internal records, so the white copy goes to Gunderson, and—" He stopped in his tracks. "No, that's not right. The yellow copy goes to Gunderson, the pink copy stays in here, and the white copy... I can't remember. It's the weirdest thing, I can't remember."

Sulley looked up from sorting. Mike was staring into space, looking more unsteady every second. Sulley rushed to pick up one of their low folding chairs and place it behind him. "Hey, you wanna sit down?"

"No, I'm fine, I'm fine," said Mike, waving him off—but he sank onto the chair as he spoke. "The pink copy goes in the cerulean file folder, or was that the...?"

"Mike—" Sulley began, placing the palm of his hand between Mike's horns.

"No, no, get offa me, I'll remember, just let me think for a second."

Sulley moved his hand to the side of Mike's face to double-check the sensation of heat, and acutely regretted not having insisted on doing this earlier. "Mike, you're sick."

"I can't get sick," Mike mumbled. "Come on, quit slacking off, we've got work to do. The pink copy..."

"Uh-uh," said Sulley firmly. "Stay right there. Hey, uh, Mr. Snowman?" he called, summoning their supervisor into the doorway. "Mr. Snowman, Mike's really sick. We're going home early."

* * *

If Mike hadn't seemed sick before, he was making up for it now. The walk home had tired him out enough that he finally stopped claiming to be fine. He stopped talking much at all, and he lay down in his bed without protest when Sulley told him to. Sulley left the light on and went to get some Tylenol.

He'd been staring into the bathroom cabinet for fifteen seconds before he accepted that they legitimately didn't have any. The concept was foreign to Sulley. He'd never really thought of medicine as something you bought; it was just something you always had around. He had already discovered a couple of times since they had moved away from Ms. Squibbles's house that there were a lot of things you were supposed to have around that he and Mike just didn't, yet. But this was one he wished they had thought of earlier. He said a quick good-bye to Mike and ran the three blocks to the drugstore.

He returned to find Mike sitting on the barstool in front of his dresser, which also served him as an impromptu desk. He had his calculator out, and was scribbling erratically on several scattered sheets of graph paper—Sulley hadn't realized he'd kept the graph paper they'd been required to buy for scream can design—and muttering to himself.

"Mike? What are you doing out of bed?"

Mike turned a few degrees to look at him, his eye bright and slightly bloodshot, and then spun back to the papers. "I've got to figure out these financials, Sulley. —We can subtract the cost of..."

"Hey." Sulley suppressed his growing worry and made his voice gentle as he walked over to the dresser and set the drugstore shopping bag on top. "Hey, Mike, it's all right. You can do this stuff some other time, okay? Look, I got you some Tylenol, and some cough syrup just in case, and there's chamomile tea if you want, my mom always says—"

Mike stared at him, and then at the bag on the desk. "You went shopping?" he asked blankly, as if he hadn't been told this information less than half an hour before. "How much did all that stuff cost?"

Sulley was taken aback. "I don't know, maybe eight, nine—"

"You don't know," Mike repeated, and slammed his pencil down onto the dresser. "You don't know? How can you buy stuff and not know how much it was?"

"I was in a hurry!" said Sulley, his voice growing defensive. "I was worried about you, Mike, I didn't think the money—"

" _Don't_ ," Mike interrupted acidly, "say the money's not important. The only monsters who think money's not important are the ones that have always had enough!"

"Now that's not fair."

"You're not Bill Sullivan's kid anymore—" And then Mike stopped, his eye wide with regret.

Even in his fevered state he must have noticed Sulley's abruptly dark expression. Sulley didn't usually talk about the details of his interactions with his dad since he'd flunked out of the School of Scaring and then been expelled from MU, but Mike had a general idea.

"Oh, jeez, Sull, that's not—you know that's not what I meant. But we're—money's got to come from somewhere now, you can't just—"

Sulley growled, "What's your problem?"

Mike recoiled. He glanced away, carefully picked up his pencil again and rested it on his notes. "We lost four monster-hours today, Sulley." His voice sounded suddenly hoarse, probably from having raised it.

Sulley's glare softened in sudden sympathy and curiosity. "What?"

"We both left two hours early, so that's four hours, and if I can't go tomorrow that's eight more, and eight more the next day, and—I mean, the Van Warwijcks were out for a week!"

Sulley felt Mike's temperature again: still far too hot, but this probably wasn't so much delirium as just Mike freaking out. That didn't make it any easier to deal with. He turned the temperature check into a slow petting motion. "Hey, calm down. Is that what you're so upset about?"

Mike relaxed into Sulley's touch for two breaths, and then spun irritably away. "Time is money, don't you get it?" He pointed at a piece of paper covered in incomprehensible notes, figures, and diagrams. "I had everything accounted for, down to the penny. I had a plan. And now it's all wrong, it's all useless."

"Mike," said Sulley, and wasn't sure what to follow it up with. "Wait here." He went out to the kitchenette in the main room, ran a glass of water and brought it back. "You could at least take take a couple of the Tylenol."

"Yeah, okay." Mike downed the pills and water.

"We'll figure things out," said Sulley. "We can pick up some overtime. It'll be fine."

"But I had a plan," Mike repeated hollowly. "I'm supposed to be—you know, the idea guy, with the clever plans, and the smarts and everything, that's what I'm supposed to be good at. And look at me, I can't even think straight. I've failed us, Sulley."

"Hey." Sulley touched Mike's arm and rotated the barstool to face him. "You haven't failed anybody. You make good plans. But sometimes plans have to change, you know that. I know I know it. And, you know, it's okay if something goes wrong once in a while! Mike, you don't have to be the best planner, or the best scarer, or the best mail guy. You're my best friend, and that's what's important to me."

Mike slumped forward in his seat so that he was leaning against Sulley's chest. "I know. I know, Sull."

"You'd better get some rest."

Mike sat up immediately. "But—"

"No buts. Listen, Mike,"—and Sulley had a sudden flash of inspiration—"if you don't get some rest, you're gonna be sick for longer. If you take care of yourself, you can be back on your feet faster. You need to go to bed. Think of it as an investment."

Mike's eye went wide and he punched some more numbers into the calculator. "You're right," he said at last, and slumped forward again.

"Hey, I meant you should get in bed," said Sulley. But now that he thought about it, he wasn't so keen on Mike climbing down from the dresser-cum-desk in this state. He hesitated, then grabbed Mike with one hand and lifted him from his seat. He hadn't done that since college, so long ago. It was rude to call attention to his size and strength, and Mike was hardly the kind of guy who needed anybody else to move him anywhere. What had once been a casual assertion of dominance suddenly felt intimate.

Sulley balanced Mike against his chest and walked slowly to Mike's bed. They didn't sleep in a bunkbed anymore, but they still shared a one-bedroom apartment. Sometimes Sulley missed the domesticity of the Oozma Kappa house, even including their closet-like bedroom. This was home now, though, and there was something nice about how they had made it home themselves, just him and Mike.

Sulley started to lower Mike onto the bed, and flinched—Mike's fingers were tangled in his fur. "Ow—careful!"

"Sorry," Mike mumbled, already half-asleep. "You know something, Sulley, you are incredibly comfortable. I can't believe I never noticed it before."

"Uh, thanks, but you really ought to—" He tried again, but Mike tightened his grip. "Mike—" he began, cracking a smile in spite of himself.

The amusement must have made itself heard in his voice, because Mike loosened his grip enough to look up at him with an answering smile. Then he leaned closer, widened his arms so he was embracing Sulley, and wove his fingers again into Sulley's fur.

Sulley let out an amused breath that jostled Mike on his chest. "Are we really gonna do this?"

"Uh-huh," said Mike, drowsy but with a hint of facetious authority. "You're warmer and softer than my bed anyway, you big furball."

Sulley rolled his eyes and walked around to his own bed. Carefully he shifted Mike's weight from one hand to the other as he lay down on his back. At last Mike lay squarely on Sulley's torso, his eye closed and his breathing regular, and without having released his grip.

Sulley took a deep breath and watched Mike rise and fall with it. He rested both hands lightly around his friend's round body, trying instinctively to provide the comfort of warmth even as he felt the heat of fever. "Sleep well," he said quietly, looking up at the ceiling. "I'm right here. We'll figure everything out."


End file.
